Metro Washington Council afl-cio

DCNA nurses met with Nigerian health care workers on March 13, and shared their similar experiences of labor issues in nursing including nurse-patient ratio, lack of deference from management, activist campaigns and more. Each group discussed some of the differences in the health care systems in the United States and Nigeria including: structure of system, private vs. public sector, the nurse’s role vs. other health care workers, workers’ rights laws and more. - Walakewon Blegay

“There is a mightier force at work…That is the spirit of independence expressed in many different forms, markedly in the new desire and therefore in the new capacity for collective action which women are discovering in themselves to a degree never known before.”

From the preface to Alice Henry's book, The Trade Union Woman, published in 1915.

Local women electricians gathered recently to discuss ways to bring more women into the electrical and other trades. Among the group were Elizabeth Fields and Susan Flashman; Fields is a former Building Futures graduate now entering her third year in the IBEW/NECA Apprenticeship School, while Flashman is an IBEW retiree. The committee of some two dozen IBEW Local 26 women has been meeting for several months to form the local's women committee. The Feb. 23rd meeting at Busboys and Poets, led by instructors Greta Nicholson and Ina Smith, “empowered participants and was a wonderful way to create and strengthen bonds among the women mechanics, apprentices and residential trainees,” who rarely see each other outside work, said Client Services Coordinator Sylvia Casaro-Dietert. The group discussions touched some critical issues for all women working in the field like code of conduct, and appropriate work clothing, as well as the importance of lobbying Congress to keep their pensions intact and to regulate proper and accessible bathrooms for women in construction. The committee is also looking at different ways to engage with the community and give back. “CSA will collaborate with them to promote recruitment and retention of women in the trades,” added Casaro-Dietert.

Click here to check out this week's Labor History Today podcast. On this week’s show: Robyn Leigh Muncy on “The Strange Career of ‘the Working Class’ in US Political Culture Since the 1950s,” plus, in this week’s “Cool things from the George Meany Labor Archives,” Alan, Chloe and Ben discover something unexpected in their “Miscellaneous” folder for the 1912 Lawrence textile strike. Interviews by Chris Garlock, Patrick Dixon and Allan Wierdak.American Labor Union founded. Note that this is not the ALU founded in 1902 that began as the Western Labor Union - 1853

Women’s rights advocate and labor activist Alice Henry was born in Melbourne, Australia. Henry came to the United States in 1905 and worked for twenty years for the National Women’s Trade Union League of America in Chicago, directing the education department and editing the League’s official journal - 1857Labor history courtesy Union Communication Services.